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Friday, October 17, 2008

Chaos (2005) Review

Chaos is a brutal and coldhearted movie that borrows heavily from “Last House on the Left” only brings the gore and violence to a near x-rating. It is NOT an easy to watch horror, slasher, or cautionary film. You have to have nerves of steel and a really good grasp on reality and fiction to sit through this one.

Chaos follows a similar storyline to “Dee Snider’s Strangeland” but resembles “Last House on the Left” a lot more. The movie is about two girls that go into the woods for a rave, score some drugs, and then are brutally raped and murdered. The rape scene’s are so intense and rabid, that at this point most will turn off their television sets. This is not too unlike the rape sequences in the film “Irreversible” but this is harder and involves mutilation and the camera doesn’t hold anything back. It is a horrible sequence of gore and horror and I wonder if the film maker’s intentions were to make a kink or snuff film because there is a very tight and fine line that the movie follows between what could be real and what definitely isn’t.

**NOTE** Since the movie is out of print, and obscure, there is no suitable trailer for me to put in this review, so just imagine it...via my boring synopsis.

The movie is hard, hard to watch, hard to believe, but is somehow true? The movie goes through a storyline of murder, then revenge, but the ending is something that bugged me greatly. I am always looking for movies where the villain wins, and in this film I get that, but not in a good way. I don’t want to see this sort of victory, and while I want an antagonist victory I don’t want it at the cost of brutality and gore for the sake of gore. I would have preferred a Hollywood hero ending, not this one, this one just seems to kick you while you’re down, considering the levels of gore and rape involved.

The movie is shot in hd but is a lower quality, and most likely was a straight to dvd release.

Why Chaos is scary: The only scary parts of this film are the facts that each year there are rapes and murders that are most likely like the ones depicted in this film. That is not to say that we should see or make films that show brutality as clear cut as shown in Chaos. The scary part is that this film’s storyline could happen, at least the first half for sure. The second half is not something that I would credit with happening, however, if John Wayne Gacy could murder so many kids and bury them under his house for so long, then this story could be rooted in the headlines of newspapers across the nation. This film is scary because of the brutality and reality of such cases.

Chaos steals the main premise of “Last House on The Left” and doesn’t credit Wes Craven at all. If you do end up watching this film, you’re going to most likely not want to watch this during dinner or after a big meal. Even the most diehard horror movie fanatic will not see this movie for anything more than a low budget attempt at snuff or horror pornography. I don’t find a whole lot of merit to this film on an artistic level, but I do understand the freedoms that would allow such a film to be made. Furthermore, I also think it’s a necessary ingredient to the bigger horror movie genre. I just don’t personally find it done well, and overall just don’t like it that much. Sure it was worth watching once, but to own it? I’m not sure if I’m the guy to watch this one over and over again. While it isn’t completely pornographic like “They Call Her One Eye” it’s got enough innuendo and brutality to make me not appreciate it the same way. Plus, this movie was done way better by Wes Craven and I would rather recommend “Last House on the Left” instead of “Chaos”, but you decide for yourself.